Microburbs.com.au is a great tool to help you understand a suburb. It relies heavily on census data, but provides a quick, easy, and free way to visualise a range of interesting types of data.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Okay, today I just want to quickly talk you through one of the free resources, on the internet, that I use when I’m looking for particular properties or when I’m looking at a suburb in general. And a lot of you may know already, but if you don’t, it’s called Microburbs. The website’s, microburbs.com.au, as you can see there. And basically, we can type in any property in Australia or we can type in a suburb. And in this example, I’m just going to go for Surry Hills, in the city of Sydney there, just to give you a really quick overview of what you can find here on Microburbs. This is all for free. There is a paid service that you can look at for other stuff as well, but I found this to be really comprehensive. Now a lot of it’s running off the census data of 2016, so you need to take that into consideration. Some of it may be slightly old. But just to scroll down here you can get an idea. On the left here, you can see some nearby suburbs and stuff like that. All the different LGA’s close by. But then scrolling down here, you’ll just get a sort of an overview of the suburb. When you go into different sections, what I really like about this is, it updates the map for you. Okay, so we can have this satellite view here powered off of Google, or just a normal map, which is what I prefer to use. Just giving you some general idea of median values there. And you can see when you change that, then over in the right-hand side there, that will give you a bit of a heat map that shows you all the way from the cheaper areas through to the more expensive there. Again, every section that we go through, even the sub-sections here. So if we look at median price, similar sort of map we just looked at. Breaking that down to two beds, three beds. It’s a really fantastic resource to give you an overview of that particular suburb. We’ll just drill a little bit more you’ll see Surry Hills itself, there. Okay, then a few more graphs down the bottom here. I mean, by all means jump on the site have a look. There’s a lot to play with, more than you can do in a quick video. This just gives you a little bit more information that might be handy for investors to know. Again, that sort of median price stuff. Sales, days on market, that sort of stuff. It can quickly show you some of the planning applications that are in with council at the moment. And where they are located, as you see on the right-hand side there. The fun stuff, I guess, is where they talk about the Hip Score, right? So if you’ve been to Surry Hills you’ll know what that’s about. How they calculate that, that’s their own little sort of algorithm I guess. But you can get an idea of what they’re looking at, bicycle commuters, creative type people, and that sort of thing. So anyway, if you’re looking at a suburb or a particular property, you can get an idea of all of these things here. How suitable the area is for families? Okay, that’s all about sort of schools and stuff like that. And then what it looks like from a safety point of view. Not rating very highly here. It is an inner-city suburb, after all. But if you look at these sort of things, and that’s plotting things like theft, and stuff like that. So there’s a lot of data that goes into it. Again, we look at something like Lifestyle Score, it’s all similar stuff that’s going to show you where all the local pubs are, cafes. And Surry Hills being so close to town that does rate highly because it really is central to everything. So you can see down here all the different types of information that you can get. And look, it’s a plethora of information, it’s an absolute stack here. And yeah, so this bit here that I’m looking at is free. So I think it’s a really solid resource to get your high-level overview of a particular suburb, or of a particular property that you might be looking at. So again, that’s microburbs.com.au.
